Re: Wishlist for oGnus

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com>]

Most of what I want is mail-specific.

* Additional article marking, and an ability to affect marks placed
  during e.g. mail acquisition.  I want to be able to notice the
  subject "fast money" or "web traffic", automatically mark it with a
  `$', and score it into oblivion.  (But I fear that wanting to change
  marks with mail-source-* and nnmail-* functions will represent a
  philosophical conflict with the rest of Gnus' management of article
  marks.  mail-source-* and nnmail-* currently hack around with files
  under ~/Mail and leave traces in ~/Mail/active, but don't affect
  things stored in .newsrc.eld.)

* A much better interface to nnmail-split-methods.  I don't know how
  I'd like this done, but I know that the current method of manually
  hacking regexps is pretty untenable for new users.  My boss, who is
  tenured faculty at CMU and CEO & CTO at JPRC, and whose research
  work has involved Lisp for the last 25 years, is trying to implant
  himself in a Gnus mail environment, and this is a big sticking point
  even for him.

* PGP-supported encryption of entire nnml & nnmh groups.  There are
  people with whom I exchange mail routinely who don't send w/PGP, but
  I'd really rather that the content not be left lying around
  unencrypted.  Hook into article acquisition the way jka-compr
  supposedly does, to auto-decrypt every message read.

* Baby's First Mail In Gnus.  Some set of functions that the
  new-to-mail-in-Gnus user can invoke which will query the user
  appropriately for the basic information required to establish mail
  handling, leaving the appropriate traces in .gnus.  Perhaps a
  customize buffer would be appropriate.
  - Where does your mail come from?
  - If some server, what is your POP/IMAP protocol identity?
  - What is your identity when sending mail, as opposed to posting to
    Usenet?
  - Here are some basic concepts of mail groups (list a few:
    personal mail, company-wide mail, mailing lists, garbage dumps,
    receptacles for outbound copies of what one sends; which ones do
    you want to instantiate, and what mail should land in each?
    [/viz./ problem of nnmail-split-methods interface.]

* Full integration of nnir into Gnus.  Generic hooks for adding new
  external nnir sources.  I use a couple experimental, in-house tools
  (JPRC is a research lab, occupied with document analysis and machine
  learning) and adding new search engines to nnir by hacking the main
  nnir.el module is rather clunky.